Cooking beans

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Michael_00005
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Cooking beans

Post by Michael_00005 »

For many of you this is probably old news, but I just learned the secret recently. As a kid one of my favorite foods was Campbell's bean soup, it's a simple white bean. I always enjoyed them, just not the preparation part. It seems like you are boiling them forever, and then you have to be watching them, and even after an hour they can still be hard. About a year ago I started going more into cash conservation mode, hence back to beans, but still I found cooking them to be irksome... just too time consuming.

Then recently someone posted an article on beans, and a simple way to prepare them. Basically you use a crockpot or slow cooker. You can buy one on Amazon $20-$30, just get one with good ratings, they all work about the same. For every cup of beans you add 2-3 cups of water, depending on what you want (soup, veggie wraps, bean burritos, etc.). Put them on before you go to bed and they will be ready in the morning. Or put them on in the morning and they should be ready in the afternoon.

Why it’s so simple:
It’s no big deal if they cook an extra hour, or if they are close to done you can flip it to warm and let them finish with the existing heat. Flip it on high or low, it really does not matter. 16 ounces of beans about $1.50 (USA), 5 cups of water, add salt, spices, an onion and you have an easy soup (~ 4 meals). I cook them this way about twice per week now, and they taste much better than from a can or boiling.

Something like 95% of the population doesn't get the recommend minimum amount of fiber, and beans are loaded with fiber, it's one of the healthiest foods to add to your diet.

I’ll have to find that article and link it.
Last edited by Michael_00005 on Sun Jun 17, 2018 1:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

jacob
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by jacob »

At slowcooker speeds, you'll have a window of about 1-1.5 hours where they go from hard to good and then to mush. In a pressure cooker, that window is about 5 minutes. However, one trick with the pressure cooker is to cut the recommended period short and finish under sea level pressure.

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Bankai
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Bankai »

Why not just buy canned? You loose a bit of nutrients but save vast amount of time/effort. I used to cook beans but once I've tried canned, I've never looked back.

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Re: Cooking beans

Post by jacob »

Because canned beans are 3-4x more expensive?

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Bankai
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Bankai »

£1.33/kg seems cheap to me. I don't think I could get raw ones for less than £1/kg but then I've not checked in a while.

Lemon
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Lemon »

@Bankai are you comparing wet weight of both there though? My experience is that dry might be slightly less/similar per kg weight but this is dry weight, once soaked it works out much cheaper.

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Bankai
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Bankai »

Was giving price for dry weight.

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Re: Cooking beans

Post by jacob »

1 Dry => ~3-5 Wet (cooked)

Michael_00005
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Michael_00005 »

I was buying canned beans, they are cheap as well. My guess would be that I spend 1/3 the cost (or less) doing it myself though, but the real reason is the chemicals in cans can leak into the food, namely PCB's

https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/29/health/c ... index.html

https://nutritionfacts.org/?s=pcb


Good to know, but so far no problems.
you'll have a window of about 1-1.5 hours where they go from hard to good and then to mush.
Last edited by Michael_00005 on Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:26 pm, edited 5 times in total.

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Bankai
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Bankai »

OK so red kidney are £1.33/kg canned. Dry are £2.2/kg but then double in weight when cooked so they are really £1.1/kg. So you're saving £0.23 per kilo. Chickpeas are £1.33/kg canned, £2.24/kg dry but then treble when cooked so real price is £0.75 so you're saving £0.58 per kilo. Seems only worth the hassle if you 1) eat tons of beans & 2) have free electricity & 3) value your time at zero. Obv. these are UK prices so ymmv.

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Bankai
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Bankai »

@Michael

Greger said in few videos that canned foods are absolutely fine as they are only slightly lower in nutrients compared to fresh ones. I'd rather take the hit by eating canned beans and everything else fresh (99.5% healthy) than spend couple of hours a month cooking beans (99.6% healthy). Diminishing returns apply to diet as well.

Michael_00005
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Michael_00005 »

Bankai wrote:
Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:01 pm
I'd rather take the hit by eating canned beans and everything else fresh (99.5% healthy) than spend couple of hours a month cooking beans (99.6% healthy).
I hear you there, simplicity is huge! If only we could absorb our energy direct from the sun!

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Re: Cooking beans

Post by jacob »

This is one of those issues where the world would be better off in metric, but it's not, so

https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/04/is- ... dried.html

The red kidney conversion factor is 2.4 (by weight).

Based on those numbers I think the laziness is justified in the British shopping market(*) unless you eat a lot of beans. Regionality (and shopping awareness) matters a lot. When/where I lived in Switzerland, I could only/only knew how to buy dry beans in 1lbs bags: Naturally expensive. My enthusiasm for shopping across the border in France was quenched at my first border crossing (the Swiss are very/strategically protective of their agricultural sector). In the US I can buy 20lbs bags of beans for under $20, so ...

(*) It's going to take a while to amortize my favorite pressure cooker in this situation.

It all comes down to the fact that canned beans is basically a canned commodity. The sales price will thus be close to the production cost minus the distribution cost.

Stahlmann
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Stahlmann »

hehe. ERE's mastermind struck one more time :lol:
just did my beans today (first time for a long time).
having the musings described above, still pondering on them :D

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Seppia
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Seppia »

Funny how quality never enters the conversation as a variable

Canned beans taste like shit (citation needed), while if one buys the good stuff dry (or, even better, fresh) then cook them the proper way*, he/she will end up with a vastly superior quality level, in terms of both taste and healthiness.

*so, very differently than the way they’re processed for canning.
Last edited by Seppia on Sun Jun 17, 2018 11:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Lemon
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Lemon »

@seppia also very true. I find Canned beans rather metallic in taste.

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Bankai
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Bankai »

To elaborate from a more general level. I think optimising for money only is a mistake. What you should be optimising for is 1) health 2) time 3) money. In exactly this order.① Obviously this does not mean increasing 'healthiness' of your diet by 1% is worth $1k a month. Each one should be considered and weighted.

Taking as an example an average person's diet. Monday - Friday lunch out (£4) and dinner out (£10) for a total of £70. Finds out ERE and decides to fix it. Cooks in a batch spending 2 hours and £7. Healthwise, just went from eating 90% unhealthy (there's a tomato in a burger after all) to 90% healthy. Further optimisation requires i.e. eating beans that taste worse but have more antioxidants to edge another 0.1%. Timewise it's a wash since time spent waiting to be served is now spent cooking. Moneywise the person reduced their food expenses by 90%.

Now, cooking beans instead of using canned saves £0.5 hence increasing savings from 90% to 90.7%, increases health by probably <0.1% and wastes 30minutes of life.

I think considering all 3 (health, time and money) is important for optimal decision making and avoiding frugality fallacy.

① in case it's not clear why: money is least important since it becomes infinite in several years anyway (covers all needs forever). Health triumphs time as it literally buys you time by both living longer and better quality of your time (life).

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Bankai
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Bankai »

@Seppia

I usually eat beans as a part of a meal and not straight from a can and my taste buds are not sophisticated enough to tell the difference.

Re vastly superior healthiness - it's been put to the test and there's barely any difference:

https://nutritionfacts.org/2014/09/25/a ... me-cooked/

What's important is that 96% of people in US don't even eat the minimum recommended amount of beans. Eating a portion a day, canned or not, already puts you in the top 4%.

slsdly
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by slsdly »

Does anybody else sprout their beans before cooking? Supposedly that is where you'll get the nutritional differences, although I can't say I've read an authoritative study.

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Seppia
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Re: Cooking beans

Post by Seppia »

@ bankai

I see your point and I agree mostly.
Still, this is not exactly negligible, and most people don't know about the part highlighted in bold.
Nutrition-wise, cooked and canned are about the same, but the sodium content of canned beans can be 100 times that of cooked.
I have never seen the "unsalted" version of canned beans, but I'm not exactly a big customer of these products


On the taste side, I would bet you would notice the difference. Most human beings recognize superior taste, they have just been trained to accept a worse product.
There's people that tell me McDonalds hamburgers are good, but it only takes two-three burgers done the right way and they quickly change their minds.

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